


Not now, not anymore

by Moonlessmondays



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Some Fluff, mentions hal and gladys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-14
Updated: 2019-06-14
Packaged: 2020-05-07 20:36:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19217080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Moonlessmondays/pseuds/Moonlessmondays
Summary: ‘The 5 times FP said I love you to Alice, and the one time he didn’t’  | Kinda AU





	Not now, not anymore

**Author's Note:**

> So I took creative liberties for this, you all need to just accept it and let's move on. I couldn't get that scene where Alice asks him if he loves her indirectly and I needed to make it long and painful so here we are. 
> 
> No beta, sue me.

 

 

The first time Alice heard FP tell her he loves her was when they were five. They were nothing more than children, with snoot in their noses, and their hands and face smudged with dirt from playing around the trailer park. She’d never had a father, and her mother had been drunk more than she’d been sober, and Alice had never really truly known what it felt like to be loved. She  _knew_  of love, her young mind have dreamt of love in all its forms and kinds, and the movies she’s watched from when they could sneak in the drive in and watch a movie. They’d be hiding in the trunk of some other southside serpent who had enough money to buy ticket for himself and a date, and would let them tag along. She’d seen grand expressions of love, the weird and  _gross_  kissing notwithstanding, and she’d always been fascinated by it, had always been a little too curious to know what it’d feel like.

And then young Forsythe Pendleton Jones the second, with his big brown eyes and his innocence, had taken her by the shoulder, gripping just enough to hold her tight and make her stay put, had stared deep in her blue eyes and told her what until then, Alice has never heard from anyone else.

“I love you, Alice Smith,” he says, “and someday when I’m big enough, I’m going to marry you.” His declaration was met with curiosity, but when he’d tried to lean in to kiss her, he’d been met with disgust and Alice is pretty sure that he still has that scar from when she pushed him hard to the ground, making him cut his palm on a stone, and making it bleed.

She had kissed his bruises away, even then, and helped him clean it, shushing him when he swore it hurt him so much, he could die. She then told him, shyly, and completely and utterly mindless of what it means – that she loves him too, and someday, she’ll wear a beautiful white dress to marry him.

It’s been a child-like a fantasy, one made by children in fact, but it was then that Alice had…unknowingly…given her heart away. It was the moment that FP had first told her he loves her.

**. . . .**

 

The second time that FP had told Alice he loves her, Alice had just thrown him out of her trailer, telling him he was a pig and she never wants to see him again. In hindsight, it had been a very stupid fight, and she doesn’t quite remember now why she’d been as upset as she was. He had done nothing, not really. She’d been the one to tell him that it was nothing, what they had  _is_  nothing, just two friends scratching a mutual itch. So they were horny, and they were there – willing and available, and so they scratched that itch together. Teen Alice had enough devil may care attitude to not really care, but she’d been in denial about loving FP for so long, that even if her rational self could keep lying and say that she doesn’t care and she doesn’t love him, doesn’t even like him for that matter, her 16 year old hormonal self couldn’t quite understand that. She was not immune to the charm of the Jones boy who had been her constant since she’d been in kindergarten.

So when she sees him hanging out with Hermione Lodge of all people. and he looked like the cat that ate the canary surrounded by that Parkside avenue princess and her gang of tweed brained cheerios’, she'd been full of spite and hate. She had lashed out on him and told him things she didn’t even mean.

He’d surprised her though, when he’d done nothing but take her by the shoulders, his grip firm but not painful and looked her dead in the eyes. His were black and determined, and she’d shrunk away, tail promptly tucked, but she tries not to be intimidated, not by him because she knows he would never hurt her.

Still, his eyes are wild and he backs her onto the wall of her tiny trailer house.

“When are you going to get it to your thick head that I. LOVE. YOU.” He doesn’t yell, his voice low and dangerous, but the point is clear and he doesn’t beat around the bush. She shouldn’t be surprised, but somehow she is. “I love you, Alice Susannah Smith. You weird, stupid, crazy, jealous woman, I love you. I love you like my life depended on it. Sometimes I wish I didn’t love you as much because it makes me weird, stupid, crazy and jealous to do so, but God help me, I fucking do. I fucking love you. Hear me when I fucking say it, Alice. I love you.”

The words hit her full force. She hasn’t known a lot of love in her life, and she definitely hasn’t known love like this. She doesn’t know what to say, so she does what she does best. She pulls him in and kisses him.

**. . . . .**

The next time FP tells Alice he loves her, he’d been desperate – it was because she’s breaking up with him.

Even he, he tells her much, much later in life, had thought it a desperate move to do so, but there hadn’t been any other thing to do or say. He had loved her then, had loved her, and it was her own stubborn pride that had gotten in the way.

She’d been pushing him away for days since, and she had been hard on him. It’d been because she’s already pregnant with their kid and she hadn’t known what to do. She did not want to be pregnant, did not want to start a family in that stupid, dirty, rotten trailer park they both called home. She’d wanted bigger, better, brighter things for her future. She had wanted the white picket fence, with the wagon, and the dog (okay maybe not the dog). She did not want hunger and neglect and the small house that was stinky and dingy.

So she had done the most reasonable thing she could have thought of at 17. She broke up with him.

That, and she hooked up with the cute blonde, with the soft smile and wide shoulders. Better yet, the soft smile and wide shoulders, came with a deep pocket and a ticket out of that hellish side of the town. She’d shed her serpent jacket, shed everything that came with it (the bitterness and the acid tongue – but only temporarily because she had been quick to realize that she could live on the other side of the town but still be bitter and acidic). She’d been the perfect, poised girl, a gilded lily.

FP hadn’t been there for that, and he had cornered her one day, fed up with her ignoring him and dodging every move he’d made to speak to her. He hadn’t been scary or inappropriate with her, had even pleaded for her to talk to him for just a minute, but she’d been flustered and guilty, that he might as well have been bighting her head off.

“I just want to know the truth,” he tells her. It was just after the homecoming, and she knows he knows something. She doesn’t know what it is, but she isn’t about to get into it with him. She just wants him out of her house and for him to leave her the hell alone. “I can accept it if you broke up with me because you’re unhappy. But even if you are, you’re no happier now than when we were together.”

She looks at him and frowns. “What the hell does that even mean?” she asks haughtily, refusing to back down, even when her knees are week, and she just needs him to go the fuck away.

“It means that you were arguing with Hal even when you’ve been awarded King and Queen of Homecoming, so I don’t think you’re as happy as you want me to believe, and I fucking need explanations, Alice.”

“I don’t have to explain anything to you. Couples fight. It’s not a big deal,” she tells him dismissively. She walks towards the door and opens it wide. “Now get the fuck out. We have nothing to say to each other.”

He pauses for a moment and looks at her forlornly. He seems like he might have something else to say, but he decides against it. Ultimately, he gets up from where he is seated and makes her way to the door.

“You may have nothing to say to me,” he tells her, and she refuses to meet his eyes. “But I have something to say to you. I love you, Alice – that really hasn’t changed.”

She doesn’t say anything anymore, but when she closes the door, her back hits the surface and the tears start coming and they don’t stop until the wee hours of the morning.

**. . . . .**

 

The fourth time FP tells Alice he loves her, it was to set her free.

It had been her wedding day.

She hadn’t thought she would end up getting it – everything she had dreamt of – the colonial with the white picket fence, the wagon, the beautiful blonde kids. Her life used to be painted in hues of black and dark red, but she’d managed to turn it around and her future looked more and more bright, with the hues of pastel painting it.

She had gotten out of that stinky part of the town and managed to cross the tracks. She even managed to finish her degree and now has a chance to write for the biggest newspaper in town, owned by her in laws. They hadn’t been so thrilled when she had started dating their son, but she had grown into them – somewhat, she supposes – and they have been tickled enough that she’d graduated cum laude, that they’re mostly lukewarm about her marriage to their son. After all, Hal is the most useless Cooper, it’s a wonder he’s even getting married at all.

FP had shown up in the hotel room she had been using for the night, unexpected. The mother of the groom had insisted, and Alice, trying to be the perfect daughter-in-law had caved in. She hadn’t thought she was inviting danger when she had made that decision.

“What the hell are you doing here?” she asks him when she opens the door and finds his face waiting for her.

“I came here to bring you back to your senses,” he tells her nonchalantly. She can smell the reek of alcohol, can probably smell it from miles away. She swats him away like a fly – unintentional, she internally swears.

“What on earth are you talking about?” she snaps at him as she pushes him away. She really doesn’t want her mother in law to hear she’d been entertaining men late at night in her hotel room because that old bitch cannot be reasoned with, and she wouldn’t be able to talk her way out of this even if she had a very logical excuse. “Get the hell out of here, Forsythe, before I do something I might regret.”

“Breaking my heart wasn’t enough for you then?” he asks her, and it shoots right through her heart but she tries to not let it show. “I loved you, Alice. I still do, how can you throw that away so carelessly? I know you love me too, so why are you hurting us both this way”?”

“I never said I love you,” she tells him without preamble. What for? This already hurts, why drag it? It’s not like it’s not true. She had never told him she loves him, even if she did – _does._ “So stop harassing me.”

His pain is written clearly across his features and Alice wants to wipe it away, take back the words and declare her undying love. She wants to tell him about the child she bore for him, the one she had wanted to keep but had to give away, but she cannot.

She doesn’t.

In the end, she doesn’t, and FP leaves with his broken heart – taking a big part of hers away, too. But he doesn’t need to know that.

No one needs to know that.

**. . . .**

 

It must be some karmic retribution now, years later, that she stands here in this room, looking at him with the same form of broken expression in her eyes. She had been so rattled, so shaken by the abrupt and surprising turn of events. She had not expected for his wife to turn up one day and stake claim on the family she had long since abandoned.

She had expected even less for FP to turn his back on her just because Gladys is back. After everything they have been through the past year, after every secret has unravelled and every stone has been turned, she had not expected for him to just walk away.

“Then what about me?” she asks him, and the words sound desperate even to her ears, and by God, Alice Susanna Smith does not do _desperate._

Yet, here she is, standing before him like a lost child, asking him, _no, begging_ him for a scrap of his love. She is knocking on that part of his heart that had heard her and had let her back in, the same one that’s loved her all these years, despite her own shortcomings.

She aches, she aches all over, but she doesn’t say more, only waits for him to say something, _anything_ , but he remains silent. He doesn’t even spare her a glance.

It’s clear.

His family comes first. She understands that, can sympathize with that. They’re not teenagers anymore. He can’t just choose her, if he even wants to choose her, because there are other hearts involved, other hearts to break and other people to disappoint.

Who is she – Alice Susanna Smith – against his children, his wife?

Nothing.

Once upon a long time ago…she had loved him and she never told him.

Once upon a long time ago, he’d told her he loved her - but not now, not anymore.

 

 


End file.
